Groundhog's Day: Prepare Now!

Groundhog's Day is coming soon -- February 2 -- and it's not too early to start getting ready. This important day now transcends the doings of Punxsutawney Phil up there in Pennsylvania; it has become a day of truly national, nay, global significance. This is, of course, because of the global warming scare. If we cannot trust the IPCC anymore, what with its predicting the melting of the Himalayan glaciers and other absurdities--and we can't--then we're going to have to make do with a groundhog or two (or three, or four....Lord knows there are a mess of `em.)

As it happens, the science of Groundhog's Day is deeply grounded. As you make preparations for the American, or Pennsylvanian, tradition of Groundhog's Day, know for a certainty that it did not just fall out of the sky. It has a history that, apparently, few Americans today know anything about. So I'll just tell you a little of it.

It turns out that, as with so many American folk traditions, Groundhog's Day goes back to the Old Country, otherwise known for practical purposes as Europe, but really meaning most of the time Britain. February 2 is a significant date in the Church calendar (at least in the Anglican calendar, if not also the Catholic one): It's called Candlemas day, which is, according to Church tradition, the day of Jesus' christening.

Now, if you're about to object that there could not have been such a Christening before there was such a thing as Christianity, just save your breath. Logic will get you nowhere when it comes to a religious hierarchy determined to smooth out all the rumpled linens of historical reality, projecting a narrative backwards to accommodate the needs of the present. Happens all the time.

Here is how the British Almanac of 1828, an original copy of which I have open before me at my desk, at page 10, describes the matter, and you will see right away the connection between Candlemas and Groundhog's Day:

Our ancestors had a great many ridiculous notions about the possibility of prognosticating the future condition of the weather, from the state of the atmosphere on certain festival days. The festival of the Circumcision (January 1) was thus supposed to afford evidence of the weather to be expected in the coming year. For St. Vincent's Day (January 22) . . . . The Conversion of St. Paul (January 25) was . . . . Candlemas day (February 2) supplied another of these irrational inferences from the weather of one day to that of a distance period:

"If Candlemas day be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight;
But if Candlemas day be clouds and rain
Winter is gone and will not come again."

In other words, if Phil sees his shadow ("fair and bright" as the poem has it), we're in for it; if not ("clouds and rain"), then not.

As the quote shows, many days we today in America rarely take heed of were believed to be predictive of this and that. We have no secular American equivalent for St. Vincent's Day, let alone the conversion of St. Paul. For some reason, however, Candlemas day, translated into Groundhog's Day, with a substitution, I guess, of Phil for Divine intercession, has stayed with us. Go figure.

It is also worth noting that the authors of the British Almanac for the year 1828, while scoring the superstitions of olden days, retained rather more far-fetched notions than they themselves understood. There is a section of the book in which medical advice is tendered season by season, month by month. A lot of it is common sense born of experience, but the advice about bleeding and leeches, well, that has not stood the test of time and the advance of medical science. They probably complained about its cost even then.

Happy Groundhog's Day!!